Welcome to the fourth quarter of 2016 — the home stretch that will make or break your overall business performance for the year. It’s also a prime time to solidify your business strategy for 2017. In many cases, that means hitting the road and networking at high-value channel partner summits and conferences.

2. Dell EMC World (Oct. 18-20): A major gathering of Dell and EMC partners and customers. We’re expecting several channel-related surprises…

James Foxall

3. Tigerpaw Conference (Oct. 25-28): A niche PSA player compared to Autotask and ConnectWise these days, but the company still has a loyal following of IT solutions providers. We’ll be curious to see the status of Tigerpaw’s shift beyond a client-server heritage to a full-blown cloud offering.

Arlin Sorensen

4. HTG Peer Groups Q4 Meetings (Oct. 31-Nov 4): CEO Arlin Sorensen and team are preparing some new value-added services for MSPs in 2017. I suspect details will likely surface at this conference…

Wendy Bahr

5. Cisco Partner Summit (Nov. 1-3): This is actually Cisco’s second major partner conference of the year. Cisco moved up this event and will now schedule partner summits late each calendar year to more closely align with the company’s internal business planning. As for the show, the big topic areas for Channel Chief Wendy Bahr will be security, hyperconverged data centers and software-defined everything (with subscription pricing wrapped around more and more offerings).

6. Intel Security Focus (Nov. 1-3): This essentially is the McAfee partner summit. And this year’s event is extremely important. Intel essentially is spinning off McAfee with the help of a Private Equity firm. Going forward, McAfee will need to prove that it can once again stand on its own — with the help of partners.

9. Max 2016 (Nov. 14-15): Historically, this gathering attracted MSPs that run LogicNow’s software. But attention on this event will be even higher. The reason? SolarWinds acquired LogicNow in June 2016. New SolarWinds MSP leader John Pagliuca says the company will unveil a roadmap for its two MSP software platforms (LogicNow and N-able) at this conference, ChannelE2E has confirmed.

Matthew Polly

10. AppSphere (Nov. 14-17): The annual AppDynamics user conference will attract plenty of partners. The focus: Application performance management (APM)… and a healthy extra serving of APM on top of that. Also, keep an eye on AppDynamics VP of Worldwide Alliances and Business Development Matthew Polly…

Where’s Your Partner Summit?

If we overlooked your Q4 2016 event — or if you’re planning a 2017 partner conference — make sure you submit it for consideration. Simply visit our ChannelE2E Technology Event Calendarfor the most comprehensive listing of partner summits and conferences worldwide. You can submit events for consideration on that page.